The Misexpectations Travel Blog

As I packed, I photographed every item I brought, because I thought I’d blog my packing list and how I wound up wearing it. I thought I was doing one of my best packing jobs ever. On vacation I want to be as sexy everyday as I wish I was always. I want to be “I don’t give a damn” free. I want to wear things I can’t/won’t wear to work. And I want to do all of this being attractive without wearing anything that inconveniences me.

I had driven to Port Aransas once before, around Thanksgiving, and by the time I passed through San Marcos the sweater I was wearing in Dallas was way too hot. So I expected the same vacation from covered skin.

I had also seen what was available in the area, outdoorsy-wise, but hadn’t been able to do much since I had a little dog with me. So we had planned to kayak, fish, bike on Matagorda Island, camp on Mustang Island…

We had also planned to leave on Saturday. This was the first expectation to get side swiped; I found out that I had to get the evil cut out of my eyes on Monday. I was told I could go back to work the next day, which I chose to interpret as “meh, you’ll be fine.. ROADTRIP!!!”

This would be awesome were it not created by a wind from frozen hell.

A few of these things went wrong. The eyes hurt more than expected. When we reached Port Aransas, the sun was shining, but a freezing wind was coming off of the water. It was too cold to stay by the water long, and I hadn’t packed much that was seriously warm, and I hadn’t thought about how to put it together in a way that looked good too. My eyes hurt and were swollen, and pretty much merited sunglasses if I wanted to have normal interactions with people. Basically, I was cold, and my eyes were taking up all my patience, and then I threw on clothes that said “I give up”. The first hotel of the trip was also made for summer, in an unfortunate way – tiny, basic, chilly room, and a big patio and pool, right next to the beach. The next day it was pretty clear that our outdoor plans were off.

The Beach Lodge – its not made for cold nights watching TV.

Thom is not a beach person. I don’t mean that he hates the beach in and of itself, but he’s not strongly drawn to it. He does dislike the theme of it. He doesn’t like bars with thatched roofs, drinks with umbrellas, beach flavored decor, lounge chairs, or giant shark statues. I was in a foul mood. This made it somewhat hard to find much to do in Port Aransas. I was beginning to feel a sense of personal failure that Thom and I were going to have our first non-amazing trip together.

But.. then things got better. We explored an aircraft carrier and biked on the boardwalk at Corpus Christi, found an Irish pub, got better hotels. The next day the weather was as I hoped it would be. I wore something that didn’t suck, and we spent two days getting tattooed, which in all fairness had been a big goal of the trip. I forgot to have Thom take the outfit shots I had intended to blog, and continued to wear my sunglasses. We wandered the riverwalk in San Antonio, made snide comments about passersby, and ate over priced street tacos at El Mercado. By the end of the trip, I looked normal in bar lighting.

Don’t look too closely at my eyes.

I joked with Thom at one point that we needed to take more pictures, because if we didn’t, everyone would know we didn’t have fun, and the only thing worse than not having fun is everyone knowing you didn’t have fun. We didn’t burn through what would about to dozens of rolls of film in the way we usually do, and a lot of things went wrong, and a lot of our plans fell through. But in hindsight, we did have fun. Not the kind of fun that makes many good blogs though.